Upgrading Ubuntu 13.10 32-bit to 14.04 64-bit (Dell XPS 15z)

I’ve been running Ubuntu under 32-bit for a very long time – in fact, in all the years I have used Ubuntu, I have never installed a different architecture (unless you’re talking about Ubuntu server). Histirically, this has always been because, when doing clean installs, Ubuntu 32-bit has always been the recommended option. More recently though, I have come across issues where having a 64-bit OS will have been of some use. I thought the upgrade to 14.04 would be an ideal time to make the change to 32-bit.

Upgrade Option

Upon reading around the subject, all information I have found has suggested that an in-place ‘upgrade’ is not possible and that any attempt would leave a lot of mess requiring cleaning up. As a result, I prepared for the worst, expecting to do a fresh install of Ubuntu and then restore my files from backup. I was, therefore, very pleased to see the option to upgrade my existing 13.10 install, instead of wiping the entire disk.

Nothing to Lose

With my original plan to do a fresh install of everything, I had no real issue attempting the upgrade first. Should it fail, I could just start from scratch. During the upgrade, the installer makes a list of all the installed software, and where possible attempts to install the 64-bit equivalent. Where this is not possible the software is uninstalled. The following applications are among those which I have had to reinstall:

Oracle JDK 7

Eclipse (I never use the repository version)

AfterShot Pro (I can’t actually install this at the moment, as it depends on some libraries no longer available in 14.04)

GIMP

Chrome

Skype

MySQL Server

Python Dev packages and Python MySQL libraries.

MySQL Workbench

As mentioned above, I have been unable to install AfterShot Pro – I’m still looking for a solution to that. Otherwise, all installed apps have worked well and my home folder was left intact – which was the ultimate goal of doing an upgrade rather than a clean install.